


Triptych

by Rotpeach



Series: The Great Tumblr Rehoming of 2018 [34]
Category: Boyfriend to Death (Visual Novels)
Genre: Casual Sex, Other, Public Sex, Seduction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2019-10-07 09:49:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17363726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rotpeach/pseuds/Rotpeach
Summary: You have an encounter with someone likeminded in an art gallery.





	Triptych

You find him standing in front of Salvador Dali’s _Temptation of Saint Anthony,_ smiling absently at stilt-legged creatures with gilded palanquins and voluptuous women on their backs crossing a bleak desert, and you are overcome with desire.

The chatter of passersby fades into a dull murmur in the background, throngs of tourists and art students blurring together into a formless mass in your peripheral vision. The lights in the minimalist brick-walled gallery seem to fade behind you. Everything narrows into this moment and makes your heart pound in your chest as you cross the laminated wood floor and stand a step behind him, trying to see what he’s seeing.

“They call him the Father of All Monks,” he says, startling you. His cologne is something subtle that you can’t put your finger on and his voice is smooth like velvet. “He was among the first to live a monastic life in the desert, depriving himself of earthly comforts.” He steps to the side, inviting you to look at the painting beside him, and you hesitantly step forward. He’s taller than you realized from a distance.

“And yet this is how he is best remembered,” the stranger muses, gazing at the figure kneeling in the corner of the canvas. “It’s said that Saint Anthony was preyed upon by demons that sought to tempt him away from his faith. He resisted and returned a man of legend, but the moment of temptation is what we fixate on, the things he might’ve seen and the chance he might’ve failed.”

Saint Anthony’s little wooden cross seems more like a pitiful trinket in his straining hand, a grand gesture rather than a proper ward against evil. The first animal in the procession, a white stallion, rears back and threatens to trample him underfoot.

“That is strange,” you agree. “He isn’t even the focus of the painting. The animals are.”

“Representations of the demons,” he says, and for the first time he turns to look at you, a charming smile on his lips. “Though it makes for a more appealing picture, don’t you think?”

You glance at him out of the corner of your eye. “You prefer to look at temptation than to see someone overcome it?”

He chuckles. “I might be a bit of a hedonist,” he admits.

“The sort who goes to the art gallery to find someone to flirt with?”

“Don’t pretend you didn’t do the same thing.”

You smile coyly. “Just looking for likeminded company.”

“You might’ve found it.”

He turns as though he means to walk away but he moves slowly, providing you plenty of time to catch up, ambling down the hall past surreal landscapes and stern-faced portraits. “Might’ve?” you repeat curiously.

“Your gaze keeps wandering, my dear,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with a pretty face, but that alone won’t hold my interest.”

You raise a brow. “A hedonist who isn’t content with just lust?”

“Didn’t John Stuart Mill say one should pursue the higher as well as the lower pleasures?”

He stops walking in front of a collection of paintings partitioned off from the rest of the exhibit by a dividing wall in the middle of the room, gaze drawn to the image of a satyr strung up in a tree, a figure with a crown of laurels taking a knife to his skin. You’re struck by the contrast between the satyr’s horror and the joyous revelry of the people around him, delighting in flaying him alive, and forget to respond.

 _The Punishment of Marsyas,_ the plaque beneath it reads. You gaze at it in twisted fascination.

“The lower pleasures,” the man beside you murmurs, your heart skipping a beat when you feel his hand find yours, fingers trailing up your arm. “Short-lived and instinctual.”

“I’m more in agreement with Bentham than Mill,” you confess. “I think dividing everything up into higher and lower pleasures is ridiculous. Pleasure is pleasure.”

That grants you his undivided attention once again as he turns to you, mirth reflected in his eyes. “Oh?” he asks. “You simply go through life taking what you want without thought of the consequences?” His hand moves from your arm to your back. You feel him pulling you closer and are only faintly aware that you’re in a public place.

“I give it a passing thought.” Your eyes flick down to his arm as you feel him stroking your back. “I think about how good I’ll feel, how long I’ll feel good, how likely it’ll actually be pleasurable…things like that.”

“Hedonistic calculus,” he says with a smirk. “You think a division between higher and lower pleasures is arbitrary but you’re willing to quantify your pleasure?”

You turn back at the painting but glance to the side at him, trying to suppress a smile when he disappears behind you and you feel his hands resting on your hips.

“Or,” he murmurs, speaking against the shell of your ear, “is it that you know how easy it is to manipulate the numbers in your favor?”

You suddenly hear the click of high heels over the floor somewhere in the next room and come crashing back to reality, realizing just how close he is. Your face flushes in embarrassment but you get a thrill out of the possibility of someone seeing you like this.

“Look at Marsyas,” he urges, nodding at the satyr in the center of the painting. “Look at the excitement in the eyes of those attending his public humiliation and torture. You can excuse something like that as moral and just, can’t you?”

You shudder at his breath on the back of your neck. “If their pleasure is greater than his suffering,” you say, “then yes.”

“You could get away with murder with such a broken system of morality,” he chuckles. “Don’t you find that reprehensible?” You feel him toying with the edges of your clothing, fingertips slipping beneath and teasing your skin. Voices float down the hall, passing by you both. You can’t be seen from the entryway but someone would just have to come around the corner to find you here. You turn around and grasp his forearm, pulling him against you.

“It’s not reprehensible,” you say, looking up at him through a half-lidded gaze. “I’ve just considered the consequences, and they don’t matter to me.”

He smiles at you, and then he throws you back against the wall, wedged between two golden frames containing one of Hieronymus Bosch’s hellscapes and a painting of a man bludgeoning another to death. Your breath hitches in your throat when his hands run down your body, pushing your pants down around your hips, just far enough that the cool air in the gallery hits your blushing flesh and make you crave the warmth of his hands.

“Your honesty is refreshing,” he murmurs, and you hear the zipper of his pants before you feel his cock pressing against your inner thigh, hot and pulsing. “But you’re going to get yourself into trouble someday.”

You wrap one of your legs around him. “I’ll worry about that when and if it happens.”

He smirks. “Spoken like a true hedonist.” He grasps your rear, picking you up just enough to position your entrance over him. You look each other in the eye and for just a moment you’re certain you’re dreaming, you’re sure this can’t be real. Someone walks by the room again, their footsteps fading down the hall, and you tense, eyes wandering to the wall shielding you from view.

He chooses that moment to lower you onto him, swallowing your startled moan in a searing kiss. Your arms fly around his neck to have something to hold onto, your terror and excitement nearly equal

(but not quite. You want him more than you fear being caught, more than you care about what would happen if someone saw you. The pleasure outweighs the pain. The calculus comes out to a positive number.

This is not only what you want, but what you need).

He tangles his fingers in your hair and rolls his hips, fucking you maddeningly slowly. You grasp the back of his head and deepen the kiss, trying to get him to go faster. You can feel him smiling against your lips.

You hear footsteps filing into the room just beyond the wall, a tour group that stops somewhere just out of sight, and hold your breath. He withdraws all the way to the tip and then slams back into you, and you arch your back and clutch his shoulders in a panic. His tongue circles yours, trying to coax it out of your mouth, but you’re afraid to make any noise and resist him.

The exhausted drawl of a tour guide floats overhead as they drone on about St. Theophilus and his deal with the devil, pointing out the detail in the robes and face of the painting.

Your partner gives another harsh thrust, trying to draw a louder sound from you, muffling your stammered, frightened whimper with his lips.

“Sin and temptation are common recurring themes in these paintings,” you hear. “The moment before temptation is resisted is a popular subject, immortalizing the triumphs of these saints.”

(They’re missing the point, you think. The point is not the saints, nor their triumphs. The point is the temptation they faced that nearly overwhelmed them, demons offering gold and silver and sensual caresses, wealth and companionship, enough to drown in.

They do not paint portraits of saints who give in to temptation, and you think that’s a shame.

You think it would be far more relatable.)

He breaks off the kiss to whisper, “Are you afraid they might hear? Do you want to stop?” It’s a dare, a challenge.

You trail your lips over his chin and kiss his neck, smiling at the pleased hiss he gives. “What I want,” you whisper back, “is for you to go faster.”

He doesn’t kiss you this time, his grip on your skin harsher, certain to leave bruises, and you rest your head atop his shoulder when he fucks you in earnest, pressing your back painfully against the wall. You feel the corner of one of the frames digging into your side but you feel too good to care. 

The pleasure transcends satisfaction and becomes something all-encompassing, something that not only fills a void but makes the void insignificant, a religious experience that’s paradise and Nirvana all wrapped into one. Your fingers grasp his skin with the same desperate reverence others might grasp rosaries, his body your temple, his movements your prayers. You believe worship is the same as indulgence so you worship with your entire being and take everything he has to give you, legs quivering, hands shaking, vision going white. 

You lay your head back against the wall in exhaustion and feel him still moving inside of you, using your body long after your mind has departed.

(You think he was lying when he said a pretty face wasn’t enough, but maybe he can read you in ways you never even considered. Maybe this intimacy is a conversation, hedonist to hedonist, and you’ve said all the right things.)

Your eyelids flutter when his hips lock against yours, small, frantic thrusts into your body as deep as he can reach as he comes and you feel him filling you. He stays inside of you, his forehead against yours as you both catch your breath and you listen to the tour group silently file out into the hall and into the next room.

You nearly collapse when he sets you down, your legs wobbly, and startle at a handkerchief that appears in your line of sight. “Apologies for the mess,” he teases.

You smile wryly and clean yourself off as discreetly as you can, mindful of people drifting in and out of the room on the other side of the wall. “You’re forgiven. I’m sorry to dirty your handkerchief.”

“Don’t be,” he says. “Though if I can ask a favor, maybe you could wash it and bring it with you the next time we meet.”

“The next time?”

He tucks himself back into his pants and smooths his hair back into place, looking like nothing ever happened. “Unless you’re completely opposed to the idea.”

“No, not at all,” you say quickly, glancing down at the soft, white cloth. It occurs to you as you fold it up and tuck it into your pocket that he still hasn’t told you his name, and you glance up to ask.

He’s gone. You’re alone in the room. You still aren’t sure you didn’t imagine it, but the handkerchief is in your pocket, a quiet reassurance.

You turn around, looking at the paintings he fucked you between. Beside Bosch’s chaotic landscape is a portrait of fratricide, a man gripping another by the throat as he struggles to escape, weapon raised overhead. The title is _Cain Slaying Abel._ Something about it makes you nervous. You retreat back from the unsettling image and step on something.

You lift your foot and find a ruffled black feather on the gallery floor.

**Author's Note:**

> original tag commentary included "pretension: the fanfic"


End file.
